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Did MS Lobbying Stop NSA Work On SELinux?
inquisitive points to this CNET story on how George Wash Univ. may help Linux gain certification under the Common Criteria, certification required for software to be used in some sensitive government roles. In the same story, though, is an interesting quote from another effort at bringing GPL'd software to the public sector: "'We didn't fully understand the consequences of releasing software under the GPL (General Public License),' said Dick Schafer, deputy director of the NSA. 'We received a lot of loud complaints regarding our efforts with SE Linux.'" Sources familiar with events said that aggressive Microsoft lobbying efforts have contributed to a halt on any further work. 'Microsoft was worried that the NSA's releasing open-source software would compete with American proprietary software,' said a source familiar with the complaints against the NSA who asked not to be identified."
...called competition.
'Microsoft was worried that the NSA's releasing open- source software would compete with American proprietary software,'
Apparantly MS is worried that it'll catch on.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
If the NSA software would compete with MS, then the government has no business releasing it. Government isn't there to compete with private industry. It's unfair, especially considering the fact that the government can subsidize any projects with tax money that comes from it's competitors.
We have Microsoft telling the NSA what to do. Shouldn't it be the other way around?
Or maybe it's one of Bill's minions I hear breathing over the phone line?
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
It wouldn't surprise me and goes in line with their current effort of "advising" the government on how linux is evil. Remember Corel dropping linux? Yes the linux desktop was a tough market, but really there is no doubt it was a quid pro quo transaction.
Also what's with MS giving its software away for Free to a different government every week? Its a clear pattern designed to make sure noone can possibly compete. How are they even allowed to do this? I mean its not like they are some cash strapped competitor with no market share looking to get an edge. They are a convicted monopolist who somehow continues to walk between the raindrops and "get away with murder" right out in the open!
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
"Our interest is in helping to ensure that the government licenses its research in ways that take into account a stated goal of the U.S. government: to promote commercialization of public research."
As an American, i see the government to
- serve protect the people
above and beyond anything else. I include protector from other Americans, and other American Companies in this. The government was NOT made to serve commercial interests. The U.S. Gov't was made to keep individual freedoms, from the dammed British Stamps.I'm simply atonished by how a Company now has more power than an Individual. It was this way in the early 1900s and late 1800s, when de facto slavery of immigrants and whole families in factory towns led to the Union movements. Sadly, Unionization will not work in this day and age, not in these circumstances. Instead, sheer humanity must overcome evils like this, lead by initiatives like Open Source, which give the power back to the Individual, and letting him control his own destiny once more. Thank you programmers and hackers for letting OSS live on.
FSCK the man!
I'm not surprised Microsoft lobbied the NSA....
I'm surprised they listened. Didn't Alchin, senior Microsoft executive, recently testify (in the anti-trust case, IIRC) that Microsoft software is so poorly designed and/or implemented that full disclosure of the API would inevitably result in the death of many Americans? (That is, after all, what "national security" ultimately comes down to.)
Maybe Microsoft has a point that the NSA's work with SELinux hurts the proprietary software manufacturers, but by Microsoft's own testimony it should be out of the running for all future contracts anyway. I don't care about certification, when a senior exec testifies in court that using his product poses a threat to national security I want the procurement officials to pay attention!
(On a related note, I WILL be asking the Congressional candidates this election cycle what they plan to do about the Federal software procurement cycle in light of senior Microsoft executives admitting that the quality is so poor that it threatens the national security. Microsoft has made it's values clear - $40 billion in the bank is more important than lives - and I want to make sure that my representatives make our values as a country clear. I don't want to force governments to only use OSS software, but I have no patience for excuses from companies sitting on cash reserves larger than the GDP of many nations!)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Have anyone noticed this buzzword used by every Microsoft lobbying effort after 9/11 just to trying to give the probably fake impression of Microsoft being "patriotic"?
Somebody has to wake up.
'Microsoft was worried that the NSA's releasing open- source software would compete with American proprietary software,'
Indeed. We ought not have the government funding university labs, because releasing medical research to the public domain might interfere with pharmaceutical company profits.
Not everything that's good for General Motors is good for the country, or its people, or its economy.
~Idarubicin
In the Department of Defense, desktops and servers have to go through a NSA lockdown of the operating system before they can go into production. If you wanted to run linux on your desktop, the first question they ask is what does the NSA say about it.
:(
While there are lockdown procedures for Linux from what I understand, having an NSA secure version of linux would have gone a long way to validating the os from the information assurance people. I hate to be forced to use Winx for _security_ reasons.
Don
Shouldn't it be the other way around?
No.
Correct. The NSA shouldn't be telling anyone what to do. Their mandate is to collect information and provide security advice to other agencies and, where authorized, the private sector. They are not a governing body. Ditto on the last sentence for the FBI, the CIA, and various other black-op agencies running around grabbing people out of their homes in the middle of the night and confiscating their material wealth without due process in the name of the ongoing War on [insert your favorite cause here].
On who pays the fiddler orders the tune..
Only partially correct. If we truly believe in democracy and "one person, one vote", then the amount of influence we wield on our government should be proportional to the number of people we represent, not the amount of taxes we pay or, more commonly, the quantity of bribes, relabelled "campaign contributions" we stuff into the pockets of our so-called representatives.
But, even if it were 100% correct that the amount of taxes we pay should dictate the amoutn of influence we wield on our government, it should be pointed out that Microsoft almost never declares a profit on their tax returns (last year it was a 19 cent/share loss IIRC, as for tax purposes they do report those stock options which, conviniently, don't appear on the SEC filings), so Microsoft actually doesn't pay any taxes at all.
Given your reasoning, I should have much more influence on the NSA than Microsoft does. Unfortunately, that is not the case and one of the main reasons, perhaps the main reason, that democracy in the United States is falling to pieces.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Many complaints criticized the agency for providing the fruits of research to everyone, not just U.S. companies, and thus hurting American business
Gee, imagine that -- the fruits of the research that the hard working taxpayers of America paid for is also provided to those very same citizens! Outrageous! It may be true that this research also benefits any other government or company in the world which may choose to use it; but more importantly, it can benefit any US citizen who chooses to implement it.
aggressive Microsoft lobbying efforts have contributed to a halt on any further work. "Microsoft was worried that the NSA's releasing open-source software would compete with American proprietary software," said a source familiar with the complaints against the NSA who asked not to be identified.
Gee, imagine that -- the taxpayers get can get free access to the fruits of the research which their tax dollars made possible. Lets not forget, MS can also get access to this research and implement it: either the exact implementation, which would need to be separated (at a hands length) from other components of MS' OS, or the idea and make their own implementation, which they could license under any scheme they wanted.
Microsoft would not comment directly on its lobbying efforts, but did stress that it wanted to ensure the government continued to fund commercial ventures. "The federal government plays an important ro7le in funding basic software research," said a Microsoft representative. "Our interest is in helping to ensure that the government licenses its research in ways that take into account a stated goal of the U.S. government: to promote commercialization of public research."
That's interesting. According to MS, the government has an obligation to make taxpayers pay twice for the what their tax-dollars funded. Come on. Research is publicly funded because it can help all of the US, not just corporations like MS. Gee, tough concept there -- everyone pays taxes to support research, thus everyone should benefit from it, not just MS. Again, MS can make use of this research internally, thus benefit, or even put it in their OS at a hands length, or develop their own implementation of it.
In addition, the Common Criteria process, run jointly by the NSA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology under the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP), is better suited to certify proprietary software coming from a single company. It's ill suited to deal with the myriad updates that the open-source community produces on a regular basis.
Then the solution is rather simple. We create a central organization of Linux volunteers to handle the mriad of updates, and they analyze and review those updates (quality-control), and submit them to the NSA and the NIAP.
Back to the government development of GPL'ed software. I think that whenever possible, the government should develop using the BSD-type license (actually, I think that the public domain should be redefined to be like the BSD-license, so that credit is always given and that the "source" of the originals are always distributed under that "license"). This is because the BSD-license allows all of the US taxpayers to implement the code in exactly the way they choose, even charge for it or make non-free modifications; but it also preserves the commons aspect of what was created by a public effort. In some cases, it may be necessary to develop under the GPL because that which your basing development off of is the GPL; such was the case in SE Linux.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Comment removed based on user account deletion
IMO Government research, if it is to be done at all, must be placed in the public domain for all to use. Its undesireable and unneccesary to have the government advocating any particular license. Using BSD or X11 license would make more sense for government software projects. Let everyone (even proprietaries) get some use out of it. After all, all that money to pay for it was stolen from them too.
Years ago the University Ag Campus where I went to school had a meat shop where you could get cheap beef/poultry/pork, etc. These were animals that had been raised on the Ag Campus farms for research and teaching and were no longer of use in whatever project. But they got into hot water with the Krogers supermarket chain because they were a gov't entity competing with private enterprise. NSA's Linux enhancements are no different. It isn't clear to me that MS is in the wrong here. Gov't should not be writing GPLd software that cannot be used in proprietary applications. A BSD style license would be much better. And such software efforts should be relegated to research only and not be attempts to build production ready software.
FreeSpeech.org
"The federal government plays an important role in funding basic software research," said a Microsoft representative.
As a US tax payer, that is MY MONEY they are talking about there. I have no objectisons to the federal goverment funding development for things they need, but Microsoft is talking as if it is their right to have the money. It is not a right. Software may not be a significant part of the US budget (though much of it is obscured in other items), but it still amounts to millions or even billions of dollars a YEAR! (I used to work from one company that was getting a couple million a year to develop software, combine that with a few other companies)
I pay taxes on the money I earn. I expect that money will be used as carefully as I take care of mine. (and I'm known as a frugral guy) That doesn't mean spend no money, but it means think twice before spending it.
It is NOT the job of the goverment to fund research. Microsoft has a large pile of money, it is their job to invest that money in research. It is the goverment's job to see where the goverment needs something (that may not even be useful to anyone else), and supply money to get the need filled quickly. Any other research is for universities, and should be public domain.
When you think about it, the government's only real job is to defend the rights and freedoms of its citizens.
But wasn't that *exactly* what the NSA was doing by working on Security-Enhanced Linux? Defending your rights and freedoms by making sure the computers on which they depend are more secure? Should they be entrusting this job to corporate America, instead?
Second thing: What should happen to software that the government creates? Should it never be released to the public, left to sit and wallow as a waste of our tax dollars? Aren't we better off by having more choices in the marketplace instead of less?
(Wow -- every sentence a question.)
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
in the article, the fear was that american businesses would suffer because, if the nsa produced open-source software, it would be available on a international level, and would offer more competition to american businesses.
"Many complaints criticized the agency for providing the fruits of research to everyone, not just U.S. companies, and thus hurting American business."
which is all bullshit: open source stuff would promote more and better research; you have to learn how to do it better/faster/whatever when everyone just got access to the latest greatest way of doing it (whatever "it" happens to be).
anyway the good news is,
"Despite the intense battle surrounding the open source, the NSA will still fund research on secure operating systems based on Linux as well as work with U.S. companies to create better security in their own operating systems."
spin-tastic!
Now, did you actually say anything to refute the previous poster? I mean, you can't deny the fact that the government already has its hand in quite a lot of things, through academic grants, defense research, etc. etc.
How the government wields power in this arena is how it premits the fruits of that labor to be releasesd. Refusing to release code under the GPL, but simultaneously allowing vendors to appropriate code developed with public money, smacks of hypocrisy and shows a clear bias in how they approach this issue. It is obvious that they bowed to pressure from a few whiney corporations threatened by Linux.
So, either the government keeps its hands off industry entirely, or it should plays fair and impartially. You can't have it both ways, using the former argument to attack the latter.
To release source code under the GPL, you have to hold the copyright to the code.
The US Government (in this case represented by NSA) cannot hold a copyright, the law does not allow for it.
No copyright, no GPL, end of story.
But I have no doubt that M$ whined too.
Poul-Henning Kamp -- FreeBSD since before it was called that...
Apparently, all of a sudden the NSA's partner, Secure Computing Corporation, came out and made a special exception from their Manditory Access Control Patents for SELinux. It may have been a desperate act to keep the NSA on board. It seems this company was deriving exclusive software patents from work partial completed/funded by the NSA. If I were a generally unaware politican told of this situation by a Microsoft birdie, I would see it a fraud/waste as well.
Although I cannot know for sure, from the basic facts availible to me, this seems to be a case of SCC's software patent greed biting them on their own ass. MSFT probably spun it as, "the govenment partially paid for labor leading to a patent for a competitor of ours, and it's not public domain.
Disclaimer: I hate software patents, as much as I would hate math patents if they existed. This may bias me against SCC.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
Though I think that there's no basis for MS' complaints, all credability to them would be lost if MS released their additional improvements or modifications into the public domain or under the BSD license.
But the question is, can the government do that? According to the GPL, no. But, the owner of a copyright can grant exceptions to the license. Thus, Torvalds could grant an exception to the NSA regarding SE Linux, which would be as such: the original source code of the kernel/Linux upon which you based your modifications must still be released under the GPL; however, the modifications or additions you made may be released into the public domain or under the BSD license.
Furthermore, such would give the GPL license legal credability, as the government would be asking for an exception (though the NSA already gave the GPL license legal credability by releasing their modifications under the GPL).
That said, perhaps there should be some modifications of the GPL to allow people to release modifications under alternate licenses (which would include the public domain and OSI-certified or OSS licenses), if they can't possibly (due to legal restrictions) release it under the GPL. After all, its better that the modifications be released under a BSD-like license or the public domain (as opposed to the GPL), than not be released at all (which would ocur if the authors of the modifications were prevented from releasing modifications under the GPL).
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Therefore, when the government interferes with free enterprise, it's interfering with the rights of its citizens.
By providing a free operating system, the US govt. is NOT 'interfering with the rights of its citizens any more than:
1. The public libraries interfere with the private bookstores' rights.
2. Police officers interfere with private security firms' rights.
3. Public water fountains interfere with bottled water vendors' rights.
4. Free public skateparks threaten private Van's-owned parks.
I think it's high-time the US govt. supported an open-source OS project. Though backwards in its perspective on human rights, China is lightyears ahead in its thinking on this subject. If we had a national open-source OS that was used in every government office and available to citizens for free, it would be a dozen times more powerful of a punishment than any wrist-slapping the DOJ is going to give to MS for it's anti-trust crimes.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
>Linux is slower and less stable than windows
...If you're running a 486.
./configure . It ckecks for everything you need on your system and errors if you dont have it.
Which versions? Are you using standard (good) hardware or POS rummage stuffs?
>My windows box uses about 40 megs of ram to boot, Linux uses about 175 (and
Linux is a monolithic kernel)
I'm using 172 MB of memory (with all the nicieties ON). And about that "Monolithic kernel crap"..
modprobe idiot_slashdot_poster IQ=1
>Linux crashes much more often than windows, way more
How so? Windows freezes much more on me. Even hangs during INSTALL. I've never seen Linux hang like that.
>The few Apache/MySQL vs IIS/MS SQL tests I have seen have been won (sometimes dominated by) Windows
I dont care about those tests... However, I do remember some test that had really crappy hardware for Linux and a quad proc with Win. Wonder what won that...
X is a one size fits all poor implementation at a responsive display server (both Apple and MS are moving to hardware accelerated GUI)
>KDE is maybe the only thing on earth more intigrated than windows explorer, everything under the sun imbeded into konqueror, it makes it clunky as hell, Nautalus is nearly as bad
Damn straight. It crashes a lot over stupid stuff, and it does hog memory. Still, after it crashes It works OK.
>Ease of use for the newbie is not as important as ergonomics for powerusers, but Linux has yet to bring an environment to the table that I can efficiently get work done it.
If you like Windows interface, go use FVWM95. I'll stick to using KDE and Wmaker.
>WinXP Pro comes with a 480 meg CD, Mandrake is 3 CD's and SuSE is 7
That's all apps you can use. Only thing I need to download is a DVD/AVI app. Windows comes with garbage (MSNMessenger vs. Gaim , IE vs. Moz, Paint vs. Gimp, nothing vs GCC suite).
>NTFS is much more stable than any Linux file system, hard shut down in Linux and watch it fsck your box
Permissions on WinNT are much nicer to deal with. Still, XFS and Reiser are really good for Linux. Only a second or 2 to "check disk".
>Installing software on a Linux system is badly broken, often you end up fixing make files, chasing dependencies, or in situations where you can't update a library with out breaking other apps, many libraries are not very backwards compatable and someone still has yet to write an installer for Linux. Nullsofts SperPiMP installer for windows is only 498K but such a simple installer has yet to exist for Linux because it's design is funamentally flawed.
Even windows 3.11 had an installer and you can install the 32 bit libraries for it and still run binaries that were compiled on XP, lets see Linux do that
Creators dont care to package a nice installer like the one Loki used in UT install. Still, if you compile static LIBS inside your binaries, thye'll run on nearly any Linux X86 platform (if that's the arch you compiled them for). RPM's are OK, but you have different companies repackaging them and breaking them. Still, the best is AUTOCONF
>Developers will often use GPL just so they can avoid having to create and test seperate packages for the last 3 versionsof every major distro, GPL lets someone else do it.
Yep. Essentially they are lazy in a certain regard. If you'd undertsand, they make the app for themselves alone. If somebody else wants it, try it out. If it doesnt work (and you want it), you fix it and submit patches. That's part of the cost of using Linux stuff. It doesnt cost money... Just time.
>The exists no development environment more compelling than gcc and emacs, for this reason Linux apps will always be behind
QTdesigner, INTEL's cc, KDevelop... I'd say they're "nice". Still, that's a simple bitch comment.
>Would like feedback on this
>Thanks
A better analogy:
Say you have a chain of lemonade stands and are selling weak, unsweetened lemonade for $199 a glass. The lemonade stand is your only source of income, so you want to protect it. You forbid anyone from sharing the lemonade they drink and if they drink your lemonade you forbid them from drinking anything else to slake their thirst.
The community deploys water fountains, a few people put down fruit trees and a few start selling different kinds of fruit juices.
You bribe public officials with "campaign contributions" to pull the water fountains and send hired goons to intimidate, buy out, or otherwise break up your competition.
That's a better analogy of what Microsoft is doing with regard to Linux.
And no, I wouldn't hire goons, grab an axe, or bribe officials. I'd start offering what people were asking for rather than crush the life out of them like an asshole.
I have a problem with this statement:
Many complaints criticized the agency for providing the fruits of research to everyone, not just U.S. companies, and thus hurting American business.
This is pretty biased. Shouldn't it be more like 'Many complaints criticized the agency for providing the fruits of research to only free software developers, not to all software developers and companies, thus hurting American business.'
How would developing the security extensions in the public domain, or under a BSDish license keep them from being used by 'everyone'? Putting then in Linux (and consequently having them been covered by the GPL) does a much better job of keeping 'everyone' from using them than a more free license like BSD.
If the NSA were going to do something like this, they should have based it on one of the BSDs instead. By developing the extensions in Linux, they effectively made them useful only to Linux - putting them beyond reach of countless software companies. Of course, this has been the software industry's complaint to government funded research producing GPLed software from the start.
Yeah back in the early part of the century before Redmond bought the rights to everything that ever had been or ever will be invented, thought of, spoken, typed, glyphed or otherwise ideated or communicated in any living or non living mode. Then they put a EULA on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and made people pony up dollars if they wanted to be a legitimate licencee of Freedom and Democracy. Everyone else was sent to the Gulags "to protect them from themselves and to insure that the bona owners were not stolen from."
Then they added a new ammendment to the Contitution EULA that effectively invalidated the 13, 14, 15 ammendments of the old Constitution and made it legal for software companies (MS because by then there was only one) to literally own people and make them buy software whether they wanted to or not. Debtor's prisons came back online after over 200 years. The shortway around that was to simply become the nation and hire the entire country as cadres of MS employees. Everyone became a 'limited use MS employee licencee'.
Around 2014 was when DoubleplusXXXP+# was running the food distribution complex in east central Billtania (formerly called the "Midwest") and a major BSOD glitch caused 65 million people to starve to death. In order to make up market share MS tripled the food EULA charges on the survivors and then cut their wages by 30%. Which is when the mass suicides and infanticides began.
In 2018 Bill proclaimed himself God-Man and licenced the air we breathe now.
...with a few thousand unpatched Linux boxes? There's no magic bullet that suddenly makes a given server safe for eternity out there, now or ever. As the lifetime of a server unpatched and unmanaged (as all these hypothetical NT4 boxes in your example are) reaches infinity, you can be damned sure that the probability that ANY box gets rooted out reaches 100% as well.
Or will running SELinux and forgetting about those patches be different from running NT4 and forgetting to run well-publicized best practices checklists?
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Well, the U.S. government does place restrictions on one's right to give software away (in the case of strong cryptography). Hence OpenBSD is based in Canada.
But do these U.S. export restrictions apply to free software? The current crypto export regulations (section 740.13(e)) seem to grant an export License Exception for publicly available source code and object code compiled from publicly available source code provided that the original publisher of such code notifies crypt@bis.doc.gov (cc: enc@ncsc.mil) of the code's public availability. (Notification seems not to be required for mirrors.)
Hence Mozilla is based in the United States, where the only restriction on exporting OSI Certified(tm) open source encryption software is that it not implement a system primarily designed to restrict the fair use of a copyrighted work.
Will I retire or break 10K?
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
I sort of work on SE Linux. Our group is unsponsored by the NSA (thus far). Since we are unofficially working on it, though, we hear birds chatter sometimes. The rumor mill around our office has been saying that it is not the case that Microsoft has done anything. What happened? A party, whose name shan't be mentioned, because we have not been told their name (we shall call them the Party), was given an SE Linux contract by the NSA. The NSA it seems didn't understand the GPL so well (or some lawyer of theirs who hammered out the contract didn't). The NSA contract said that the Party working on the contract could have propietary code, and could patent ideas used to achieve goals on the project. Much work was done on SE Linux in the mean time by the Party, but patents/etc are held on certain parts of the code by the Party, and therefore cannot be released under GPL. The quotes you see in this article heading make perfect sense to me in this context. The NSA didn't understand the GPL. And yeah, I would complain too if I couldn't have the complete source to my kernel...
Yes I hate Microsoft, but this article is kind of ridiculous...it uses some vague quote to make microsoft look bad. This is not the way to win the war.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
The distinction between MAC (mostly used by the military) and Discretionary Access Control (the common form in most OSs) is classical in the security literature. SELinux was primarily an attempt to produce a MAC system our of a free resource, Linux, that is highly usable, works on cheap hardware, runs lots of applications, and could do many functions for the government. Microsoft, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't even offer an OS with MAC capabilities. That the NSA would be cowed by Microsoft nonsense out of continuing development on a worthwhile project that could save the government hundreds of millions of dollars is absurd and criminally stupid.
Writing server-type apps to live within the constraints of a mandatory access policy is tough. (Look at how much crap runs as root because people can't make it live within the UNIX permission structure, which is far less restrictive.) But it's the only approach that works, because the applications aren't trusted.
If you want to help, make some major application, like a mail program, work under SELinux, with as little trusted code as possible. Somebody was doing this for an FTP server, but those are of limited use. A mail server on SELinux would actually be useful.
Having worked there, I can tell you this: intercepting a US person is a SERIOUS infraction. Its not something you can do without running afoul of a lot of laws. The abuse done by the NSA during the Nixon years caused a lot of severe curbs (both open and classified) to be placed on the NSA, and those laws have serious teeth that will bite anyone violating them. As with the armed forces, there are a lot of very liberty minded folks working there to preserve your freedoms at the cost of their own. One example is that free speech is very limited once you hold certain accesses and clearances.
IMHO, you're in more danger from those folks at the FBI.
You really ought to do a seach on "USSID 18". I cant say anything confirming or denying, but there are some very interesting things that have been declassified out of Big Daddy DIRNSA's pockets.
Secondarily, its NSA/CSS. Ever hear of the CSS side of the house? I suggest you look it up before posting obvious biased off-base stuff thats based on a hokey movie [sneakers].
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
I think the line about anyone having access is telling, but not in the way many people seem to be taking it. The NSA isn't concerned with US citizens having access to SELinux, although I'm sure that some people within the NSA are. They are concerned that security technology developed by the NSA will be made available to other countries. The NSA is fighting the tide of knowledge. The Soviet Union used to do this, to an even more dramatic extent than our government does. Anything mailed or published outside the USSR was subject to censorship. Soviet scientists used to get around this in interesting ways. For example, a physics paper was published that started "Imagine the interior of a star .... ". The censor immediately decided that there was nothing of interest militarily and passed the paper through for publishing in Western Europe. The star described could not possibly exist, it was actually describing a third stage thermo-nuclear explosion and gave Western physicists insight into the sophistication of Soviet nuclear weapons technology.
Information and knowledge cannot be prevented from spreading, as the Catholic Church in the middle ages learned, as the Soviet Union learned, and as the NSA keeps trying to forget.
In my universe I'm perfectly normal, it's not my fault you don't live in my universe.
So let me get this right: the National Security Agency develops a port of Linux to augment, unsurprisingly, national security. Microsoft bitches that national security runs counter to their profit interests and manages to get SE Linux terminated.
Fine.
But let's be sure to mention this next time Osama bin Ballmer starts foaming at the mouth about how Linux is un-American, and remind him that Linux developers have never undermined the safety of American citizens in order to line their pockets.
And while we're at it, let's consider what gigantic software monopoly distributes a flight simulator capable of accurately emulating passenger airliners, along with detailed scenery of American airports and major urban centers, complete with individual office towers.
Of course, having already crippled Naval warships, I shouldn't be surprised that Microsoft is now trying to cripple our chief intelligence agency.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Did anyone bother to check the info? This quote may be old, misquoted (or misinterpreted), or dead wrong.
:-)
Dick Schafer is not the deputy director of the NSA. Per one of their press releases over two years ago, Bill Black is the Deputy Director:
http://www.nsa.gov/releases/newddir_071000.html
Also, SELinux was updated on July 3rd. Sounds like a bit of work for a dead project
http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/news.html
I am Me. No one else is Me, but Me. You are You. Get over it.
We've /.ed "www.nsa.gov".
At first I was surprised, but a Netcraft look-up explained it all.
"The site www.nsa.gov is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000."
That does NOT comfort me at all.
Having the U.S. government develop open source is just fine. We, the people, are the ones paying for the work, and the results of the work belong to us. However, having the U.S. government develop under the (full) GPL results in software which is restricted, and not available to everyone. The appropriate result of government work is really the PUBLIC DOMAIN.
C//
This is absurd. GPL'd software can be used by anyone willing to abide by the terms of the license. If a company chooses to make proprietary software and not release the source, they are voluntarily choosing not to use GPL'd software. It is ridiculous to say that they "cannot" use the software; that is a choice they made based on their own business model.